Career enquiry: find your red thread and be curious around it

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Avelines first joined Innit, a US-based foodtech platform, as senior vice president international operations and managing director. However, she felt a pull toward healthcare, began to research the sector, carefully interviewing more than 70 representatives to develop an understanding of business terrain and its challenges, and took on a transition turn-around assignment as CTO and CMO to gain an initial first-hand experience.

“One red thread throughout my career has been technology. I have always been, and will always be, astonished by the endless possibilities new technologies create,” she said.

Healthtech continues to promise a revolution in healthcare and Avelines’ current role as CEO of SIBIUS reflects its groundbreaking potential. SIBIUS implements the latest research with neuroscience-based and patented technology, Digitrack. This AI-based platform enables a quick and data-driven assessment of the cognitive state of a subject, and as a result helps with early detection of disorders such as ADHD, autism, or dyslexia. “Current methods and tools to assess and ultimately help diagnose these disorders are still mostly based on subjective tests and observations, and in many cases carried out very late in a child’s development,” she explained. “Our ‘cognitive thermometer’ allows a much earlier, faster and objective evaluation to identify people at risk. The results from our pilots and partnerships are very encouraging.”

The SIBIUS platform leverages the latest neuroscientific research, which established a correlation between eye movements and tactile exploration, resulting in the Digitrack patent. Using simple, tablet-based tasks, the user explores blurred images with their finger and the exploration pathway is analyzed to assess their cognitive state and whether he/she is at risk of cognitive disorder.

In a pilot undertaken with Metropole de Lyon, France, 115 school children aged 3 and 4 underwent the test and 23 were found to be atypical. Furthermore, 13 students, most of whom were girls, were newly identified to be at risk and therefore invited for further monitoring and follow-on tests. This is significant because, as research has repeatedly found, medics and educators often overlook girls with cognitive disorders because their socialization effectively teaches them to mask ADHD/ autism characteristics more than that of their male counterparts.

SIBIUS wants to achieve systematic testing at a young age, just like the routine tests for eyesight, weight, and hearing that all children undergo throughout their primary years. “We want to test 13 million children in the next five years and, as a result, help detect at least 1 million suffering from neurodevelopment disorders,” said Avelines. “Being able to support kids from their youngest age is a game-changer for them, for their families and their teachers.”